


Mate, You Should Probably Know You're Drowning

by Zayrastriel



Series: The Drowning 'verse [10]
Category: Actor RPF
Genre: AU Fic, F/M, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-22
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-26 11:43:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/650170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zayrastriel/pseuds/Zayrastriel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ara picks up a rather bedraggled Tristan Entwhistle</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mate, You Should Probably Know You're Drowning

**Author's Note:**

> SORRY, TRISTAN.
> 
> ALSO SOMEHOW THIS WAS REALLY AWKWARD TO WRITE.
> 
> ALSO I HAVEN'T REREAD IT BECAUSE NOOOO.

He’s getting low on supplies when it happens, which he supposes is a good thing.

(Not that he was getting low on rations, that they found him before he ran out.  Though to be honest it might have been better if they’d…never mind.)

In any case, he’s not only getting low on rations, but is also more than a little lost.  Not surprising in and of itself since, by his reckoning, he’s been lost for a good year and a half or something.  But dawn is coming with a pale rose-gold blush tinting at the horizon, and while it’s pretty it also means the _things_ will be around soon. 

And he’s in the middle of an open plain, an easy target for any of them.

It’s just that…he hasn’t slept in a good two days, since a sleepy but ravenous _thing_ interrupted him the night before and it’s all stupidly rushing up on him at once…

“ _Duck_!”`

It’s one of those things.  If someone shouts _Duck_ at you then you tend to do it.

He ducks, just before a gunshot rings out in the plain.

He stays ducked, just for safe measure, till a hand grasps at his shoulder, roughly hauling him off of the ground.  “Come _on_ ,” the person hisses, and before he can really think about how curiously familiar that voice sounds he’s being dragged along, too malnourished and confused to protest.

He’s not sure how long they run before they stop, the woman (there’s enough light now to see that) looking carefully around before crouching down. 

“Through here,” she orders, that voice sounding more and more familiar.  With a ridiculous amount of effort, he forces himself to look past that haze of exhaustion when she turns around to look up at him.

He feels his eyes widen in perfect synchronicity with hers.

“ _Tristan_?”

“ _Ara_?”

 

~

 

“Dude,” Lia says after he’s been pulled, unprotesting, through the tunnel by Ara into a town that looks like it’s come straight from the 1800s, after he’s led through a door and Ara says with a certain amount of smugness, “ _You’ll never guess what I found lying around today_ ,” after Lia squeals and gives him one of those bone-crunching hugs that he has to return with equal intensity till Raine mutters “ _get a room_.”

“Dude,” Lia says again, shaking her head in disbelief.  “Weren’t you in Germany or something?”

“Yeah, how exactly did you end up here?” Ara adds.

“Uh-“

“And what have you been _doing_ for the past two years?  How did you realise we were here?”

“Uh,” he hedges.  “Where exactly is _here_?”

Ara, Lia and Raine exchange _Looks_ in the way that girls tend to do whenever he’s around.  “You don’t know?” Raine asks.

“You don’t know,” Ara sighs.

Lia glances at the others.  “He doesn’t know,” she says with a roll of her eyes.

“Obviously,” he tries, but they essentially ignore him, doing the silent eyebrow conversation thing that tends to either leave him feeling amused or wrong-footed.  Right now, he’s probably going to settle for the latter…

Something Lia said earlier finally catches up with him.  “Wait.  _Two years_?”

Lia and Ara face-palm and Raine straight-out laughs till she sees the reactions of the other two.  “Wait, are you actually serious?” she asks him, wide-eyed, and must read the answer in his expression because she copies Lia and Ara almost instantly.

“Dibs not telling him,” Raine adds.

“Not _me_ ,” Lia and Ara say simultaneously, glaring at each other. 

“You dated him,” Ara points out.

“Exactly,” Lia counters.  “Which means I had to deal with him for a year and a half.  Your-“

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes, can _someone_ tell me whatever I’ve been missing?” he finally snaps, sick of all the bickering when he’s spent – really, two years? – being panicked and terrified and, perhaps worst of all, _confused_.

They all freeze at his outburst, and when they move it’s to fidget awkwardly, with more than a little embarrassment.  Finally Ara sighs.  “Basically, the apocalypse.”

“…Sorry, what?”

“The last two years.  An apocalypse.  Zombie style.  That’s what’s been happening,” Lia says.

He nods slowly, piecing together everything he’s seen, every town he’s passed by and all the _things_ that he’s been running from; the dead bodies he’s left behind, all of it.  “Okay,” he says, and then passes out.

 

~

 

In his defence, malnutrition is a perfectly valid reason to faint mid-conversation.

He’s more than aware of the fact that his ex-girlfriend and other female friend are going to hold this against him till the end of time.  They’re surprisingly light on the teasing, however, as they watch him shovel fruit and soup (apparently he’s not allowed to have any _real_ food till his body’s used to metabolising that) as fast as he can.

“So what happened to you three?” he asks around mouthfuls of food.  “After you left Germany?” It comes out a little less coherent than that, and Ara’s nose wrinkles slightly in disgust, but she doesn’t say anything, glancing at Lia.

“Well, we pretty much did our whole travel thing, and we were here when we saw the news about Australia.  Just haven’t left, I suppose.”

“That was August 2016,” Raine adds.  “And then January last year, Lia picked up-“ She stops abruptly as Lia makes wild hand gestures – more than enough to pique his curiosity, but not strong enough against the seemingly endlessly ravenous hunger that’s still wracking his body.  “Um.  Yeah.  Anyway, a couple of months later in April, we managed to get back into the satellite networks, figured out who’s still alive-“

“Raine!” someone calls from the doorway in a heavily accented voice (European, North European, though that’s as good as his accent detection is right now).  “Call from London!”

“Coming!” she yells back, already pushing back her chair.  “Have fun with the whole apocalypse explanation thing,” she adds as an almost-afterthought to him, running out of the room.

“London?” he asks.

Ara shrugs.  “Meh,” is all she says.

Lia is more forthcoming – “Raine has a _boyfriend_ ,” she croons.  Ara raises an eyebrow at her, and for some reason she shuts right up with a subdued, “yeah.”

“So,” Ara continues, turning back to him and taking his now-empty plate – he didn’t notice – from the top of his blanket.  He wants more, but before he can even ask she shakes her head.  “Can’t eat too much,” she says, not unkindly.  “It’ll be the biggest waste when you throw it all back up again.”

Probably true.  Still, logic doesn’t stop his stomach from crying out for nourishment.

“Anyway,” Ara says.  “We’ve got Alice - from our NSG group – down in Antarctica.  They’ve got a full base of operations and practically untouched satellite control because it was way too cold for the zombie virus to even survive at all, let alone infect anyone.  Fiona – again, NSG group, don’t think you remember her – was up in the Blue Mountains till there was this whole tension thing with the zombie government in Australia-“

Zombie…government?”

“Oh yeah,” Lia jumps in, “they can like, think and everything.”

“Malcolm Turnbull’s Prime Minister,” Ara adds.  “Ate Tony Abbot in Parliament,” and he can’t help but scoff at the irony.

“So basically,” Lia says, “all the human peeps have been getting together – that’s how Raine met the London guy, Will, he’s like the Minister for Foreign Affairs or something-“

“Assistant Secretary of Foreign Affairs,” Ara mutters.

“- Whatever.  “And he totally got drunk and told her she was hot last Halloween,”

“Relevant, Lia.”

“- Dude, totally.  And then there was this summit, yeah, like in December, and just after that apparently he found out about this whole plan by NATO-“

“Which still exists,” Ara says drily, “despite the fact that like half the member states are zombie-controlled.”

Lia stops, crosses her arms (he remembers that from their relationship, as long as it’s been since then) and glares at Ara.  “Are you telling this or am I?”

“Fairly sure I was, but go ahead,” the taller girl says, waving a hand magnanimously.

“Hmph.  Where was I…?”

“Whole plan by NATO?” he prompts.

“Oh yeah – to nuke like half the planet after making a deal with the zombies to split the world in half.  Only then Will drunk-dialled Tracey-“

“Sorry, _who_?”

“Tracey – you know, girly girl, loves Justin Bieber and One Direction, engineer in Canada – no?  No?  Okay – well, she’s in Canada with Bree-“

“Dude, you _suck_ at story telling.”

Lia shoots another glare Ara’s way.  “Okay, fine.  Bree’s in New York – or was, but now she’s in Canada with Dianna Agron – Glee actor, you probably have no idea who she is, it’s all good.  Anyone else I’m missing?”

“Continue, I’ll probably think of more.”

“Bitch.  Anyway, so Will calls Tracey, and Tracey calls me and tells me and Ara, but Raine’s in the room and overhears and gets really pissy – sort of obviously, because Will told Tracey but not her and yeah trust and relationships equals _important_ but then she calls him during a NATO meeting and almost lets slip that he told Tracey which would get him killed because of some whole vow of silence thing he had to take and that’s all fine now, apparently but yes.”

There’s a long silence after Lia finishes her sentence, panting slightly.  He stares at her for a moment, then turns to Ara.  “Can you summarise that in a sentence or three?” he asks without much hope.

She shrugs.  “A two year long human-eating zombie apocalypse with potential nuking and genocide issues.  Romance drama that everyone actually cares about more than the whole apocalypse, often involving famous people for some bizarre reason.  We’d better win this shit because pretty much everyone’s dead and all of us are more than a little bit crazy, and did you know Lia’s having passionate emotional sex with Tom Hiddleston?”

A look at Lia confirms it’s true.

He thinks about it.

“Good summary,” he says finally.  “And no, I didn’t know, but I suppose I’m not particularly surprised.  This already sounds like it’s out of a fanfiction, anyway.”

Ara thinks about that, eyes narrowed.  “Yeah,” she says thoughtfully.  “Sounds like something I’d start as some sort of crazy fanservice for Lia, and then end up continuing because of the potential actual-story value.”

For a moment, his lips quirk in a real smile; and then another pang of hunger-full-stomach pain hits him, leaving him curled over in agony.  Lia rubs his back, and through the shirt he can feel the calluses on her fingers, calluses he doesn’t remember from before she left Germany and that a couple of years of sitting cooped up in a town couldn’t have given her.  As Ara pours him a glass of water, her sleeve rides up and he sees scars, running alternately jagged and straight, a mix of accidental injury and pain, deliberate and external to mirror, at least in part, something internal.

He thinks, suddenly, back to his uni friends.  There were three of them that were out on a field trip _that day_ – must have been the day the world ended, because there were no trains back into the city, and a flood of confused, terrified people out. 

Nicholas split from them then, bent on finding his girlfriend back in Berlin city.  Michael hung on for four months, maybe, before he went out looking for food one night and never came back.

It’s not a fanfiction or at least not any he’s ever thought about reading.

This isn’t neat, this isn’t a story with a beginning and a middle and an end.

This is reality, and he can’t help feeling like he’s drowning in it.


End file.
